How a Canadian history buff (may have) solved a Second World War 'pigeon-code mystery'

A Canadian history buff has attracted international attention for proposing a possible solution to the so-called “pigeon-code mystery” that emerged last month in Britain after the remains of a Second World War carrier pigeon — along with the secret message it was transporting from a European battlefield nearly 70 years ago — were found in the chimney of a home in the London-area village of Bletchingley.

Canadian retiree Gord Young, a historical researcher from Peterborough, Ont., claims to have deciphered much of the message using a First World War codebook inherited from his great-uncle.

And he suspects he’s also identified the British paratrooper believed to have released the pigeon following the invasion of Normandy in June 1944, an attempt to send details about enemy positions and movements to Britain’s intelligence headquarters before the soldier was killed a few weeks later in northern France during the successful Allied advance against German forces.

“First of all, we have to understand that this guy was a hero,” Young told Postmedia News, suggesting the paratrooper identified in the message as “W. Stot Sjt.” was Sgt. William Stott, a 27-year-soldier with the Lancashire Fusiliers who was killed in July 1944 and is buried at a Commonwealth war cemetery in France.

“I’m hoping that this (proposed solution) will get something going over there to look into this further,” Young added.

The pigeon’s bones and the coded note — still rolled up inside a small tube attached one of the bird’s legs — were discovered in the 1980s when Bletchingley resident David Martin was renovating his home south of London.

The message was later given to Britain’s top codebreakers at the Government Communications Headquarters in Cheltenham, but the intelligence agency recently acknowledged that its officials were unable to decipher the antique message without the corresponding codebook, and appealed to the public last month for help.

“GCHQ’s experts are now satisfied that the pigeon-borne message assumed to have been sent during the Second World War cannot be decoded without access to the original cryptographic material,” the agency stated in a Nov. 22 news release.

“Unfortunately, much of the vital information that would indicate the context of the message is missing. It is undated, and the meaning of the destination – given as ‘X02’ – is unknown. Similarly, while the sender’s signature appears to say ‘Sjt W Stot,’ nothing is known of this individual or their unit.”

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But as the story about the chimney pigeon drew global media coverage last month, Young — an editor with Lakefield Heritage Research, a Peterborough-area local history group — examined a published image of the coded message and compared it with encryptions from his great-uncle’s codebook.

Young found that much of the message — which was made up of 27 separate, five-letter, coded phrases — could be convincingly worked out based on shorthand abbreviations adapted from those used in the First World War.

He also reasoned that the paratrooper had likely been trained by a First World War veteran who employed a code system based on his own battlefield experiences.

For example, Young interpreted the first phrase — AOAKN — as “artillery observer at K (section), Normandy,” and LKXGH as “Lieutenant knows extra guns (are) here.” Two other phrases — DJHFP and RBQRH — are deciphered as “determined Jerry’s headquarters front posts” (with “Jerry” a common signifier for “Germans”) and “right battery (head)quarters right here.”

One numeric message found on the note — 27 1525/6 — was translated as “June 27 (1944), 1525 hours,” presumably the time when the pigeon had been released with the message. And two other notations, “NURP 40” and “NURP 37,” are believed to indicate that two homing pigeons had been released with the same information from Normandy to ensure that if one went astray — as the Bletchingley bird clearly did — the second would deliver the message to communications contacts in Britain.

“They were saying it’s indecipherable, and that’s nonsense,” Young said in an interview. “I’m not saying what I’ve got is totally accurate either, but I’m at least trying to show that it can be cracked. Somebody somewhere has got a World War II codebook like I’ve got a World War I codebook.”

He added that while he isn’t certain the sender of the pigeon was the William Stott who was killed in the weeks following the June 6, 1944 D-Day attack, “the time frame is about right and the location is about right.”

Young has been in contact the GCHQ about his proposed deciphering of the pigeon’s undelivered message.

A GCHQ spokesperson told Postmedia News that “we stand by our press notice of 22 November 2012 in that without access to the relevant codebooks and details of any additional encryption used, the message will remain impossible to decrypt.”

The spokesperson added that, “similarly, it is also impossible to verify any proposed solutions, but those put forward without reference to the original cryptographic material are unlikely to be correct.”

This week, following extensive weekend media coverage in the UK of Young’s proposed solution to the pigeon mystery, the GCHQ issued a statement saying that agency officials “have followed with interest media reporting on possible solutions to the encoded message found on a dead pigeon in Bletchingley,” but added that “hundreds of these proposed solutions have been carefully examined by the expert cryptanalysts at GCHQ” and “so far none have proved credible.